


from the earth

by charcoalsuns



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Gen, Team Team Team, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 08:41:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16678285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charcoalsuns/pseuds/charcoalsuns
Summary: In which Aran reflects on warmth, and the places it might be found.





	from the earth

**Author's Note:**

> This is a piece I had the chance to write for an Inarizaki e-fanzine called ["The Small Things,"](https://twitter.com/inarizakizine) which just finished its order run. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who worked to put this project together, and thank you to everyone who supported the finished product! It was wonderful to be a part of it. <3

  
  
There’s no telling what Kita’s thinking, sometimes. 

Oh, sure, Aran could ask, and Kita would tell him – would tell him _something_ – but Aran doesn’t always want to ask. Sometimes he wants to let silence gather unbroken. Sometimes it’s peace he finds in the thoughtful air. 

Today, their breaths come in puffs and swoops as they make their way down the streets, loose gravel crunching like it’s standing in for snow beneath their shoes. Aran digs his hands into his pockets, tastes the idle dream of investing in fleece jackets for the entire team, or maybe just fleece-lined pockets, if that’s less expensive to order. 

Maybe just a pair of usable gloves for himself, before it really starts getting cold. 

“I think I’ll have a bean cake.”

Aran blinks out of thought, and into another. As all of Kita’s careful paths, the one between his mind and his words is nothing if not precisely trodden. But be that as it may, Aran follows along as if from an arcing height, as if through a cloud of canopy, and he has no idea what conversation is being continued, or begun. Ended? 

He reminds himself of peace, and tries, “We could stop by the bakery before we turn home?” 

Kita smiles his crease of a smile. “No need. There are enough.” 

The late afternoon dims around them; overhead, a train clatters punctually onward. As they emerge from shadow at the other end of the tunnel, Aran finds no additional enlightenment. 

But before his questions drift away unasked, Kita lifts his face in measured offering, chill-pinked skin catching the sun like a charm in the wind. “Enough for three,” he says. “My grandmother would be happy to have company.” He turns his smile toward Aran, then, composed and sure as the string that unfurls from a kite. “As would I.” 

Aran’s heart gives a small soar. “Well, I’ll be glad to visit,” he says, grinning back. There isn’t a more welcoming thought to hear.

  
  
  
  
  


On a weekend that scatters storms of ice across the entire region, Kurosu obtains permission to make use of the indoor track, and their training runs are buoyed by the novelty of a new route to follow. 

For a little while, anyway. 

Twenty minutes in and their throats are too dry to ignore; an hour in and the twins have to be yanked back by yet another shout toward the scruffs of their necks: 

“Just because we’re running in a circle still doesn’t mean you two can sprint on ahead!” Aran pitches after them, a last-ditch entry to a ceaseless race, ideals of _teamwork_ and _pacing_ lost to the stale air like so many of their labored breaths. 

Running beside Aran at two strides for his every one is Akagi, who might well be gazing out a window in class on a sunny afternoon, for all that his focus seems to pass through the track curving ahead to land somewhere beyond it, somewhere Aran, for one, cannot see. 

But _he_ keeps pace. He presses forward with a constancy Aran only appreciates more and more as their practices accumulate, and his voice carries calmly through the rising edges among them. 

“Gin,” he says as he’s passed on the right. 

Gin’s neck is safe, but despite this he ducks his head, glancing toward Akagi with both guilt and the spirit of competition grappling back and forth over his face. “I was just gonna yell at them to quit it,” he hedges. They’re on a straight stretch now, ripe for overtaking, but he stays beside them. 

Akagi smiles. Where Kita’s unfolds like a crease toward a paper crane, his has the absent curl of a page as it sails past on the wind. “You don’t have to chase them,” he says, looking up at Gin. They’re all breathing hard; Akagi’s mild voice sounds unsteady, jarred from his mouth as they run. 

Gin listens. “I know,” he says. “Sorry.” 

Laughs are as uncommon as apologies, when it comes to practice. Akagi closes out the novelty. “No need,” he says, breaking his form for the first time to clap a hand to the space between Gin’s shoulder blades. “None of us like to hold back. But your body remembers some things, yeah? Don’t run it dry when we’ve just started.” 

A nod, vigorous as only Gin can manage. “Got it!” 

When Aran next glances over at Akagi, he looks half elsewhere once more. But he reacts to every turn with precise, efficient shifts, and Aran knows well – he is watching as closely as any of them. 

In the end, Gin does make his pass. But he finds himself a spot in the pack, not a stretch away from Kita who sets the tempo at their head, and before long, Gin’s strides even out, matching pace along with the rest of the team as they continue round after round after round, counting breaths by the sounds of their feet as the storm howls outside.

  
  
  
  
  


“If you wanted another, you should’ve bought ‘em yourself, you damn _freeloader_.” 

“Says the moron who keeps taking stuff he can’t return.” 

“Some stuff is communal, you’re just stingy about it.” 

“You— Callin’ me _stingy_ —” 

A scuffle ensues. Aran, attempting to ignore it in favor of a fresh curry bun, closes his eyes on the sight of aborted chases and focused shoves, and channels all his remaining senses toward the bundle of goodness in his hand. 

Spices, plentiful, but not to the point of looking for water. 

Steam, rising in increments, reminiscent of quiet exhales from a portable space heater. 

It smells like home on a weekend. His fingers only feel the day’s chill on their outsides, his mouth is filled with the rich, happy taste of _first food after practice_ , and despite all of this, a headache begins making itself known against the side of his head. 

His free hand reaches out, snags a wound-up arm. 

“—goddamn— Oh, Aran-kun. Hello.” Osamu gives what might, in certain company, pass for an innocent blink. Likely knowing this, he doesn’t bother to heighten it with a smile. 

Aran is unmoved. “You two,” he starts, and as is typical, finds he can’t decide how to continue. He drops Osamu’s arm with a sigh. From the corner of his eye, he registers the silent shutter of Rintarou’s phone camera. “Do you ever just...take a break?” Even Aran isn’t sure who he’s talking to now. 

“A good photographer follows his subjects,” Rintarou says, heavy with the burden of a job none have asked him to shoulder. Beneath his thin coat, he slouches along to match. 

“He’s keeping evidence of ‘Tsumu making an ass of himself,” is Osamu’s take on the situation. 

Would that any of this made sense. 

“How d’you know he’s not keeping a record of every time _you_ snap?” comes Atsumu’s retort, punctuated by an arm thrown around Osamu’s neck. 

This time, Osamu doesn’t so much as push him off, only raises his stare toward the dead, open sky. The part of Aran that has yet to give up on achieving comprehension takes a pause, and falls over. 

“Aw, now look what’s happened.” 

“And whose fault, I wonder.” 

“Well, you’re right, ‘Samu, but it’s fine, I’m sure Aran-kun will let you have another chance.” 

_Aran-kun will not,_ Aran thinks to himself as they yammer on. He won’t! This time he means it. Not one more chance. Not for Atsumu or his endless provocation – not for Osamu, lying diligently in wait for every opportunity to counter – not for Rintarou who stands aside and watches the two of them clamor like trains playing on a circular track. 

He looks down at his half-eaten curry bun. Steam has stopped rising; it doesn’t smell as much like _home_ as it did before. 

This time, he definitely means it. 

Except— 

Rising instead through the scent of vague defeat, through the gaps between reprimands made in vain, there is the billowing, bellowing fierceness of something differently familiar that Aran, try as he might, cannot reject. 

They lead him far from peace, these teammates of his. But there is something to be said for the wind they bring, and the vacuum they leave in their wake. 

There is something to be said for a second home.

Overhead, clouds settle into tired droves like they, too, are preparing for a long night’s rest. Aran breathes in the kind of spindly air that leaves his nostrils frozen and hallucinating, and as he stuffs half of half a curry bun into his mouth, he takes a moment to grumble about the lost warmth, the faded freshness. 

It’s all right, though. He can, he supposes, always get another tomorrow.

  
  
  
  
  


Eventually, suddenly, they run out of tomorrows.

There isn’t much to say when they take their leave. Everything important has been said before; everything necessary is hanging like a fanfare from the upper balcony, black folds and white lettering, a sight Aran will not forget. 

Indifferent to them all, January seeps in through the window frames. The gymnasium air holds itself with the slightest unease, swelling with a pause for _more_ that must, for the first time, go unresolved. 

Aran breathes it in. 

As he empties his lungs once more, something of that unease stays behind. A phantom of an ache, with no single cause. Without the release of constant movement, his body feels like a shell over an excess of energy, and no amount of recognition that this isn’t a definitive end would seem to settle his nerves. 

But beside him, Akagi shifts his weight off-center, fingers tapping inside the pockets of a jacket they hadn’t needed to reorder. On Aran’s other side, there is a space, from which Kita has stepped forward and is addressing the Inarizaki volleyball team as he does, as if it is an entity separate from himself. Oomimi has his hands folded neatly behind his back, and his amusement folded neatly into a corner of his smile. 

Even on a day like today: with this group around him, Aran cannot help but to feel settled. 

“See you in Tokyo for the Inter-high, huh,” Oomimi says to them later. Practice has begun; they walk away from the gymnasium under a grey, still-bright sky. 

Aran thinks he can smell snow, hanging in wait like the stillness that had filled the room when they’d bowed for a last time, in acknowledgment and transference and expectation – and alongside it all, in thanks. “For sure,” he says. It’s not a question. 

Akagi hums; Kita looks up at the not-yet-snow. They walk on in silence, unbroken. 

There is a warmth that has nothing to do with temperature. A warmth that might, perhaps, be measured in something like degrees. An exhale, close against a pair of wind-chilled hands before they burrow away once more; a mass of sedentary air that nonetheless rushes, past the ears and elbows and insides of thighs of a training run, several dozen strong; a wispy cloud of fragrant steam, rising like a forbidden memory from an eagerly split open bun. 

A sensation that can only be measured in the trickling past of hours and days, of months upon months over which it has grown. 

Aran cannot seem to find an exclusive name for this warmth. Instead, he takes stock of the places it wells up within him, bringing grins to his face even through exasperation, and building the kind of strength each of them will carry onward, woven like a pennant they have fought for, but never had to win. 

He calls it pride. He calls it gratitude. 

He calls it a time worth remembering.  
  
  
  



End file.
